1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid ejecting apparatus which discharges liquid from nozzle orifices of a liquid ejecting head such as an ink jet recording head.
2. Related Art
There are several types of liquid ejecting heads which discharge (or eject) liquid droplets from nozzle orifices by causing liquid pressure to change in a pressure chamber. Examples of such liquid ejecting heads include an ink jet recording head (hereinafter, simply referred to as recording head) used in an image recording device such as an ink jet recording device (hereinafter, simply referred to as printer), a color material ejecting head used to manufacture a color filter of a liquid crystal display, an electrode material ejecting head used to form an electrode of an organic electro luminescence (EL) display or a field emission display (FED), and a bioorganic substance ejecting head used to manufacture a biochip (biochemical element).
In the recording head, for example, in the case in which the liquid is discharged from the nozzle orifices, fine liquid droplets called satellite droplets are produced along with main liquid droplets, and sometimes the satellite droplets cannot arrive on an absorbing member and turn into mist. The liquid droplets, which turned into mist, (hereinafter, referred to as mist of liquid droplets) cause problems such that they pollute the inside of the device by scattering in the air while they are flying and cause a failure such as an electrical short-circuit by sticking to an electronic part such as a circuit board.
On the other hand, in the device in which a heater is disposed under a platen, on which a recording medium (discharge target) is placed, to dry the liquid droplets landing on a recording medium, the liquid droplets heated by the heater volatilize and substances in the liquid droplets rise upward and stick to the liquid ejecting head. As a result, there is a possibility that an adhesive used in the liquid ejecting head is likely to deteriorate. For such a reason, JP-A-2005-212323 suggests a technique of blowing the mist of the liquid droplets or the substances of the volatilizing liquid droplets away by blowing a stream of air to a space between the liquid discharging surface of the liquid ejecting head and the recording medium by a blowing machine.
However, in the technique, if the stream of air is blown from the blowing machine in the case in which a platen gap (gap between the nozzle orifices and the recording medium) is large, the mist of the liquid droplets is easily scattered in the device, which causes failures of the blowing machine and errors in the landing position of the discharged liquid droplets.